Friday, July 20, 2012

A Document Dump Waiting To Happen

It's a Friday afternoon and there was a mass shooting late last night, so today would be a perfect time for a politician to release some files and bury an embarrassing story.

Sorry I have nothing profound to say about Aurora; I had to do that story once and don't feel like doing it again. Instead here's some little stuff.

The Senate District 34 gift just keeps on giving. As Randi Shannon ascends into the footnote immortality of national bizarro-politics coverage, the struggle to find a candidate continues. The only name to emerge so far is Some Dude Ryan Flood, who actually moved away to run a "liberty" organization in Texas after working on the Ron Paul campaign. (Of course, Shannon didn't appear to live in the district either.) Best quote:

Flood declined to discuss his candidacy Wednesday.

“I
currently have no comment at this early stage of my candidacy,” he said
in an email. “As the special convention reconvenes I will have more to
say at that time.”

Yeah. I think a party that just got burned by a secessionist militia type candidate is gonna want this feller to open up a bit before they call that convention. Especially when Shannon's campaign finance report (.pdf) lists Flood as her committee chair.

Long time political writer Norman Ornstein argues that the wave of voter ID laws calls for "a new federal law to make federal elections free and fair, with the goal
of enhancing the ability of eligible voters to vote, not the opposite." Some provisions are sensible: nationwide early voting, weekend elections like most of the rest of the world, and "any IDs and supporting documents required for voting must be obtainable
free, and must be widely available at sites reasonably accessible to all
voters." One item is problematic: "a separate ballot for federal offices" would be a logistical nightmare.

And at Slate, Farhad Manjoo argues for the end of the Save button. (Or at least change the icon from a little floppy disk; an entire generation of kids has never seen one.)